The outcome from the Survey of Employers’ Recruitment Experiences published by Australia's Department of Employment, Skills, Small and Family Businesses cited that 44 per cent of employers stated having difficulty in their most recent recruitment activities in 2017–18, compared with 37 per cent in 2016–17.
The increase in recruitment difficulty occurred in all occupation groups, in most industries and almost all regions across the country.
Reasons for the Hiring Struggles
Most of the employers reported recruitment had become more difficult than in previous years. They indicated reasons for hiring struggles were
- A lack of qualified or experienced candidates
- Candidates lacking interest in the role
- Candidates lacking employability skills
- Nature of the work - employers believe candidates are not interested in the occupation or work conditions
- Competition with other employers for workers
HOW TO WIN IN THE TALENT WAR
To win in the highly-competitive labour market, an effective recruitment strategy is needed to ensure a continuous stream of highly-qualified candidates.
Some of the most popular and effective methods are career website optimization, launching employee referral programs and employing social recruiting:
Optimize Career Website
Your career website serves as a landing page to send candidates for more information: you can link back to your career website from social channels, email and text messages, announcements for job openings, career-oriented press releases, submit resumes for pooling and future vacancies.
Whether you are creating your new website or updating your existing site, remember the following guidelines:
- Write job descriptions that attract the right people. make sure you specify the most important job requirements to set candidates’ expectations. Don’t forget to highlight benefits to entice them to apply.
- Streamline the application process, so exceptional candidates aren’t turned off by laborious resume submission. If possible, give job seekers the opportunity to upload their resume or share their LinkedIn profiles instead of having them fill up numerous job fields.
- Customize your content to the different occupations you’re recruiting. You may want to put more content high-priority talent and vacancies.
- Make sure that your site has a responsive design so job seekers can also apply to their mobile phones.
Employee Referrals
Referrals are generally considered one of the best sources for hires due to their relationships with their inside contacts. They usually have a much better view of your organization, culture, team, and how work gets done.
Every company should have an employee referral program. As you create or boost your employee referral program, aim to achieve the following objectives:
- Consider creating a weekly or monthly newsletter that highlights open jobs in your organization. Be sure to hyperlink to jobs to make them easy to share.
- Always remember to keep employees and referred candidates in the loop regarding the candidate’s application status whether through email, text or personal feedback.
- Incentivize employees for their preferred candidates. If cash bonuses are not possible, think of other fun ways to reward employees such as time off, gadgets, travel vouchers, gift certificates, and so on.
Social Recruiting
There can be no denying that social media is mainstream. It has been fully integrated into the business and social lives and has been widely adopted as the ‘communication channel of choice ‘by everyone.
Social media recruitment needs to become an integral part of your recruiting strategy in order to help you to present a strong employer brand, engage candidates and make the hiring process more efficient, effective and measurable.
To make your own social recruiting methodology successful, keep in mind the following:
1. Set your goals – align your social media objectives with your recruitment goals
2. Understand your audience – know how to reach out your targeted clients and which social platform they spend time on
3. Select the right social platform – choose the channel that will allow you to meet your goals and reach out to your applicants
4. Assign people who will perform social recruiting – choose and train the right personnel in your organization who will be responsible for attracting and interact with candidates in social media. Don’t forget that to engage, you need to have created content and share them.
5. Measure – plan on how you will assess social recruiting process: how many people have you recruited using Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter and Instagram vs other channels like job boards or newspaper advertisement? how much did you save using social media vs paid advertising or attending job networking?
New recruiting methodologies are emerging to meet the demands of the talent competition. Faced with industry changes and skill shortages, companies must learn to understand job market trends and adapt technology-driven approaches to recruitment to enable individuals and organisations to maximize their potential in the digital age.
